Real Learning: Meet the Perfectionists

In the Disney movie Meet the Robinsons, a young orphan named Lewis has a knack for designing inventions. As he waits to be adopted, he whiles away the long hours at the orphanage creating elaborate, scientifically-accurate machines, including a memory scanner, and a hat that makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He spends an inordinate amount of time perfecting his memory scanner, in the hopes that he will be able to look into his own mind and see a long-forgotten image of his birth mother, who left him at the orphanage when he was a baby.

For reasons beyond his control (an evil villain returns to his time from the future and sabotages his machine), the memory scanner fails spectacularly at the school science fair, and poor Lewis is convinced that his failure to produce a perfect invention means that he is a failure as a person. “My project didn’t work because I’m no good,” he moans to Wilbur, another time traveler from the future who has come back to ensure that Lewis doesn’t give up inventing.

While Lewis once created inventions for the sheer pleasure of the process, his attitude changed when he began to believe that his future would be ruined if this particular invention didn’t work. Lewis became a dysfunctional perfectionist, a state that many bright children fall into without realizing it. He became obsessed with turning out perfect work, and in his mind, he began to equate his own self-worth with his productive output.

What is perfectionism? Healthy perfectionism means setting high goals or standards for oneself. Unhealthy perfectionism occurs when those goals are so high as to be impossible. A child who believes that she must be perfect, or produce perfect work at all times, will clearly become very unhappy, as it is impossible for her to ever meet her goals. While the general population contains approximately 30% perfectionists, the percentage of perfectionists among the gifted population is close to 80%.

How do you spot a perfectionist? It’s not as obvious as you might think. First, listen for the key words, “must” and “should.” The unhealthy perfectionist will often be heard commenting about how something “must” have a certain outcome, or someone “should” be doing something a certain way. Perfectionists are dichotomous thinkers, categorizing the world into black and white, right and wrong, without any shades of grey in between. “There should be a right way to perform this task, and I must do it that way.”

Certain behaviors can reveal perfectionistic thinking as well, such as self-deprecation (“Oh, I’m not good at that.”) or shyness (“I can’t go up there and do that!”) or procrastination (“I’ll get to that later.”) In each of these cases, the speaker believes the world wants them to do everything exactly perfectly, and in each case the person is trying to avoid doing a particular thing so no one will realize that they are not perfect.

There are other, less obvious behaviors perfectionists exhibit as well. If you know someone whose moods swing violently based on their most recent achievements, or who magnifies their failures while minimizing their successes, or who feels that one bad mark negates any number of previous good marks, then you know a perfectionist. Have you seen a child who is frustrated with or critical of his peers? Perfectionist. One who is constantly “tattling?” Perfectionist. Those children are looking at the world through a different lens – the frustrated child believes that there is a right way to do things, and his slower peers are doing it wrong, and the tattling child believes the world runs on immutable rules, and is unsettled by the sight of someone not following those rules.

Adult perfectionists may also put their goals ahead of their health or relationships, and untreated maladaptive perfectionism can result in depression, eating disorders (a control issue), migranes (stress related), obsessive-compulsive disorders, and even suicide. Do you know a grumpy friend who deconstructs every group activity after it ends by pointing out the flaws and failures of all the other people present? Perfectionist. And he’s not trying to be mean or insensitive – he’s just looking at the world through that different lens. In his mind, things can only be done the right way or the wrong way, and that’s just the way it is.

Why are there so many perfectionists in the gifted population? Part of the reason can be the family or school environment. Parents or teachers can, unwittingly, focus their praise on a child’s successes so completely that he begins to believe that achievement is his only route to attention. Gifted children also tend to base their self-image on their achievement, and can become paralyzed by the “Imposter Syndrome,” the fear that someone will find out that they are not as smart as everyone says, and all the praise and attention will go away. What’s the best way to make sure everyone thinks you’re smart? Never get anything wrong. Young children especially believe that one mistake can tumble the whole house of cards.

First-born children tend more toward perfectionism, as do children of alcoholics (need for approval) and workaholics (need for attention). Perfectionistic children tend to have perfectionistic parents. Gifted children whose mental age and abilities outstrip their chronological age and abilities can become frustrated by their inability to produce the elaborate structures their minds can generate, and begin to obsess about working harder and harder to achieve perfection.

Underachievement is often a result of perfectionism, when a child wants so much to be perfect, but is afraid to fail, and so decides not to try at all. Problems socializing can also stem from perfectionism, as the child begins to believe that the world around him should be perfect too, and holds his peers to that impossible standard.

In Meet the Robinsons, 12-year-old Lewis is asked to repair a time machine that his 30-year-old self invented in the future. Overwhelmed by the task, and convinced of his own worthlessness after the science fair debacle, Lewis refuses, but his future-world visitor, Wilbur, won’t take no for an answer. Wilbur brings Lewis home to visit his family, a motley collection of a dozen relatives who sit down to a dinner that includes a meatball cannon, a life-size train, and fireproof pants. It transpires that Wilbur’s family are all inventors, and they cheerfully overcome their myriad failures by following the motto “Keep moving forward.”

When Lewis reluctantly tries to fix a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich-making hat at the dinner table (similar to his earlier invention) and fails, he is devastated, but as he buries his head in his hands, he hears applause. Bewildered, he realizes that the family is congratulating him on his mistake. Wilbur explains that in a family of inventors, mistakes are just part of the normal scheme of things, and without mistakes, no progress would ever be made.

It is this attitude that we can teach our perfectionistic children to adopt. The fear of failure can cause bright children to have high levels of anxiety, to severely criticize themselves, to be unable to tolerate mistakes, even to refuse to hand in work. If we can show them that learning is a process that by definition involves mistakes, they can begin to focus more on that process, rather than a perfect product.

Two major gifts we can give our children are permission to make mistakes, and the realization that we expect progress, not perfection. Sometimes we assume that our children know what we are thinking, but there are times when our best efforts are misunderstood. Think back to your own childhood – what message did your parents send you? What reaction would a paper full of mistakes have produced?

Instead of praising good grades, we can reward effort, progress and persistence. We can develop a safe environment where mistakes are expected as an important part of learning. As Thomas Edison said as he tried to develop the lightbulb, “I haven’t failed. I have found 1,000 methods that don’t work.”

Parents can also teach courage by sharing the message, “I know you can try,” and teach persistence by calling work “practice.” We can help our children understand their mistakes by avoiding comments like, “Why didn’t you get that right?” and instead offering encouragement along the lines of “Look how far you’ve come,” “Let’s see what’s giving you trouble here,” and “That’s why pencils have erasers.” (From John Taylor’s “Encouraging a Healthy Attitude Toward Mistakes”)

If we let our children know (really spell it out) that they are valuable regardless of their grades, their self-worth will become more resilient. An excellent way to help children get more comfortable with being “not perfect” is to let them work on creative activities where there isn’t a “right” answer. In these situations, they can learn to take safe risks, to fail, and to enjoy the process of learning and the joy of discovery.

With love and support from their parents, children who suffer from unhealthy perfectionism can learn to channel their desire to learn into healthy perfectionism – which is really just a desire to be the best one can be.

Lewis realizes, after hanging out with the Robinsons for a while, that he’s not a failure just because his mind scanner didn’t work. He keeps moving forward, tries again, and not only fixes the time machine, he fixes the mind scanner as well. Life becomes a series of successes for Lewis, as he is finally adopted, becomes a famous inventor, marries a lovely girl, and makes tremendous positive contributions to society. AND, he even is able to change the events of the past to make life much nicer for his misunderstood roommate, Goob, who no longer becomes an evil villain. Now that’s a happy ending.

“How many evil villains do you know who can pull off a name like Goob?”

Special thanks to Patricia Schuler, Ph.D., on whose Confratute strand this article was based.

Lisa Natcharian is a consultant in gifted education who has just finished her master’s degree in Educational Psychology with a concentration in Gifted Education at UConn. (Hooray!)

If you are new to this blog, check out the previous entries on differentiation, acceleration, learning gifted behaviors, and much more. New entries are added each week.
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